Unusual Business Ideas That Work

Uncommon Business is a blog about people who make money online selling unusual, strange and sometimes bizarre things or provide curious services. This isn’t “One Hundred And One Ideas For Your Homebased Business” – only real, working businesses with URLs provided, so you can do further investigation on your own. And if you do own an unusual web business, make sure you submit your story to us. SHLD

Saturday, June 28, 2014

Free Slack Alternative

Slack is all the rage these days. Twitter is full of excited slackers. VentureBeat says Slack will change the workplace. TechCrunch praises Slack.
So does pretty much every other media outlet. HipChat and Flowdock must
be losing customers left and right, I imagine. Is there anything out
there, that’s better than Slack?

I think so. To me, the best Slack alternative is Bitrix24.
Not because it’s free for small teams and has affordable unlimited user
plans, but because it offers tools that Slack should be offering. These
are:

1.Solo and group videocalls

Chat is fine and dandy, but sometimes you want to
talk to a person. WebRTC makes video and audio calls from/to PCs and
smartphones fairly easy to integrate into your collaboration platform
and this is exactly what Bitrix24 did but Slack did not (yet).

2.True file management

File sharing is fine. But I expect Dropbox-like
file sharing. I want files to be available in the cloud, on my PC and
mobile devices. I want them to sync and update automatically when
someone from my team edited shared file. I want to be able to edit
documents directly inside the discussion. Again, not that hard to do and
something that Bitrix24 makes available even in the free plan. Strike
two, Slack (and HipChat, and Flowdock, and Campfire).

3.Group tasks and projects

I can write a message “Mike, can you please do …”
and get a reply “Sure”, but chances are, everyone will forget, myself
included. Project management needs instant messaging (I am looking at
you, Asana) and team chat absolutely needs tasks and todos. And shared
calendars for easy coordination.

4.Self-hosted version

I love cloud, you love cloud, everyone loves cloud.
It’s cheap and requires no setup. But then paranoia creeps onto you.
What if Slack goes bankrupt? What if NSA is reading all my messages with
funny gifs? If only I could can my hands on the source code and put the
damn thing on my server, it would do everything I want. Another major
Bitrix24 advantage in my view.

5.Extranet

Collaboration is addictive. Team chats are for
teams, but very soon you’ll want to use it for talking to clients,
freelancers and others who are not employees at your company. This poses
serious challenge. You DO want to collaborate with these people, but
you DON’T want them to have access to sensitive data and have the same
access rights as employees. The solutions? Extranet.